Discover Cancer Research at UVA

slingluff.jpg

We are entering a new era of cancer care - one where powerful new treatments and technologies may soon give us the ability not only to treat cancer, but to control and prevent it. Private support helps us speed the pace of discovery and innovation: the best hope for patients and their families who know that every moment counts.

The Patients & Friends Research Fund supports promising cancer research at UVA in three distinct areas:

  • Basic Science. Research on the cellular level aimed at discovering the fundamental causes of cancer. Discoveries may potentially apply to preventing, treating, or curing all forms of cancer.
  • Diagnosis. Research focused on better methods to detect cancer in its earliest stages.
  • Treatment/Drug Discovery. Research focused on ways to more effectively treat cancer.

Make a Gift button

You can choose to direct your gift to a particular research project or investigator whose work you admire. You can also leave your gift unrestricted to be awarded to the most promising research projects as opportunities arise.

Here are just a few of the many exciting research projects underway at UVA:

Putting the body's own defenses to work fighting cancer. Craig Slingluff, MD, and his colleagues in the Human Immune Therapy Center are mobilizing the body's own defenses in the fight against cancer — raising the possibility that we can destroy cancer cells without destroying healthy tissue. His team has pioneered a series of clinical trials for melanoma, breast, ovarian, and colon cancers.

Accelerating clinical trials for lung cancer. David Jones, MD, and his team are identifying new ways to make chemotherapy more effective for lung cancer patients. They have discovered that inhibiting a protein found in lung cancer cells actually increases the sensitivity of cancer cells to chemotherapy.

Understanding the biology of pancreatic cancer. Todd Bauer, MD, and his team are working to identify new molecular targets and novel therapies for pancreatic cancer. His team has recently demonstrated that blocking a particular protein decreased growth of human pancreatic cancers in mice and prevented tumors from invading nearby tissues.